


A midsummer's morn

by WahlBuilder



Category: Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, Banter, Fluff, M/M, Post-Canon, Sign Language, Sweet, Technomantic Culture, twenty headcanons in a trench coat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 11:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18755425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Zach takes Sean and Roy on a hunt. He almost regrets it. Amelia finds it funny.





	A midsummer's morn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Modlisznik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Modlisznik/gifts).



“Continuous current is ineffective!”

“You spend more on recharging it.”

Zach almost regrets inviting the both of them for a hunt.

He is glad to spend more time with Sean: since Sean’s arrival, in many confessions, verbal and without words, he can’t get enough of Sean — and Sean has changed. It is not only the visible, superficial changes: his clothes, his skin darker, his smiles appearing more often. It is the way he talks, the _things_ he talks about: less war and bitterness, more freedom, more duty that has nothing to do with their former duties to Mother Abundance.

Fewer edges, more… love.

Zach explores, redefines love through these news facets of Sean. A casual brush of fingers — such a small thing, not because they have to hide, but because there is beauty in small intimacy.

His lips tingle every time Sean looks at him just so, blinking slowly.

Zach is still unsure about his feelings towards Roy, though. He remembers (with shudders) the sucking black anger at the unknown other, that prisoner, technomancer, who helped people, brought Scum. Sean’s life taken for theirs.

Except that, it wasn’t like that at all. Roy dragged Sean — by Roy’s highly-doubtful account, kicking and screaming (he never specified _whose_ ) — through half of Aurora, through two plots against the Auroran Dowser, to the ass-end of the world where Innocence had been sent, to Noctis “because we’d got word Sean’s family was here”.

Zach got used to the idea that he didn’t know Sean for so many years (he has convinced himself that it is unreasonable to be envious, jealous of all the people who knew Sean while Sean was nothing more than a legend in a stern pose to the then-teenage Zach; that, it is unreasonable to get pissed over the Army taking Sean away from him — he couldn’t do anything about it, Sean wasn’t even _his_ , not like he wanted Sean to be…).

Now, he tries to wrap his mind around the fact that Sean was — there, that someone else helped him, someone else saw him at his lowest and picked him up…

(Someone else made him lose the Abundance pin, someone else removed the wires, someone else made him look his age, for once, softer…)

And that someone insults Sean on a daily basis, thinks in ways Zach would have never imagined possible, fights in visually and physically strange patterns, and uses technomancy weirdly.

His name is Roy, and Sean calls him his brother.

Zach isn’t jealous, not exactly. Okay, he _is_ , but… He’s glad that Sean is happy and he’s glad Sean has not confined his happiness to the Order alone. He thinks that maybe someone as strange as Roy was exactly what (who) Sean, a stranger in some ways, too, needed to push him out of the bog of his own mind. To kick him. To scream obscenities at him and drag him out.

(Because Zach himself wasn’t eno—)

_Stow it._

“You fucking cut my arc!”

“It was in the fucking way.”

Zach honestly considers leaving them to it, since they are having so much fun. He leans on his staff (Connor would disapprove, but Connor is back home and wouldn’t know… probably), watching them go through a pack of feral moles like it’s a stroll in the Valley gardens.

“Shadows, when are they going to can it and finally kill each other?” Amelia tilts her gun, looking down the sights.

He remembers that Amelia is the only child. “No, that’s just how they talk. How they, uh, show their love to each other.”

She looks at him like he’s turned into a mole right in front of her eyes. “By insulting and swearing?”

“Yep.”

She sighs. “Fucking Shadows.”

“Yep.”

“They shouldn’t head down that tunnel, by the way.”

“Why?”

“It might collapse from their technomancy.”

He rushes after the incessant swearing.

***

Fresh mole steak seasoned with Valley herbs, with a side of fried lichen is a good dinner after a good hunt. The rest of the spoils of the hunt are in the refrigerators in the rover (so they don’t turn into spoils literally). Amelia is happily adding more and more pepper powder to her steak, making Zach’s eyes water just from the sight.

Roy picks up his plate (“Amelia, why do you have plates in the rover?” — “So you don’t put your greasy hands anywhere near my baby, Zach. And use a fork.”) and moves away from the fire, into the darkness, though not as far so the fire can’t reach his back.

Zach takes his own plate, frowning, then goes to Sean.

Sean is on a boulder, one long leg stretched in front of him, the other bent, his plate balanced on the thigh. Sean smiles when Zach comes to him, moving slightly, and Zach takes it as an invitation and sits down. He takes the opportunity to press to Sean’s side.

“Is something wrong? Did I do something wrong that Roy… left?”

Sean is picking the meat apart with his fingers (“Why don’t you insist on Sean using a fork?” — “He won’t be messy.”). Casual and relaxed. “No. He just doesn’t like to be around people when they eat.”

“But isn’t sharing a meal important in his…” He trails off, already regretting running his mouth.

A spark flies where Roy is seated, his left hand up in the air and making signs that light up.

Zach doesn’t want to eat anymore, sweat pooling under his shirt.

Sean chuckles. “He said ‘faith’ is not a bad word and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it, especially that he’s _not_ — emphatically — a monk anyway.” Sean tilts his head, eyes on Roy’s form, and raises his voice, “Aren’t you, _Venerable_?”

Roy’s hand folds into a sign that Zach certainly can read, and then it lights up. _Emphatically_.

Amelia whistles. “Cool! I want to be able to tell people to go fuck themselves with sparkles, too!”

“Then,” Sean says, amusement coloring his voice, “we’d have a lightning show all the time.”

“And wouldn’t _that_ be cool?” Amelia licks her fork, then puts it and the plate down by the fire. “All right, lovebirds and, er… What kind of bird are you, Roy?”

“The kind that says, ‘Go the fuck to sleep, kid!’” Roy shouts back.

Amelia taps her lip. “An owl, maybe? Anyway. Don’t forget to clean the dishes and no funny business. Or, if you go with the funny business, please do it outside the rover. Good night.”

“Good night, Amelia!”

Another string of signs lights up, and Sean translates, “He threatens to zap us if we start the ‘funny business’.” His eyes, with the fire and mischief dancing in them, meet Zach’s. “Shall we?”

Zach rubs his cheek against Sean’s shoulder. “Maybe later.” It is good to not need to hide.

He does work on his steak, but the taste fades as he thinks.

The signing is another thing that Sean and Roy share. The Order does use signing — but this one is different. A different language. Auroran ways of using technomancy are an entire different language, and Zach… He feels excluded, a little.

“Will you teach me this?”

Sean smiles, soft. The fire rounds the stern lines of his face. “Electro-signing?”

“Yeah.”

Another string of signs flares. How can he hear them? But, Zach knows that night and the plains carry sounds in strange ways.

“He says, ‘Ask me yourself, Zach’.”

He frowns, then raises his voice, “And you’ll teach me?”

A lightened thumbs-up.

“If he’s your brother,” Zach muses aloud, “and you and I are together, it makes him my… brother-in-law, of sorts?”

The crow’s feet at Sean’s eyes make him look even more mischievous, and he leans to Zach, and Zach’s heart races — a spark zaps him and he yelps, sliding down the boulder, but Sean’s hand catches him and pulls him back up, and Sean is laughing into his hair.

“Warned you!” Roy calls.

Zach can’t help but laugh, too, and Sean pulls him closer, into another kiss.

There is no zapping this time.


End file.
